For the most part, their cars are better and they have a reputation for long lasting cars(At least I feel that is the case when compared to the other "comparable cars") You have a happy user base. I'm not too concerned with the whole emissions scandal: 1. I don't have a diesel and 2. Its a regulation issue. If VW acted in bad faith and degraded the guarenteed performance.. I would be pissed. We haven't see a response on what is going to happen so far.
Most of the responses to the finding have been snarky comments about "how vw is bad." (We need to find out what went wrong and fix it... circlejerking about the whole issue, or the negative press, isn't going to do a lot of good)
>If VW acted in bad faith and degraded the guarenteed performance
Um... That is exactly what they did. They falsified their emission test results. The car you are driving is NOT the same as the one that passed the tests.
The fact that it was possible to deceive the tests does not change the fact that they were blatantly and illegally falsifying them. The performance of the vehicles when they pass the proper regulations is likely to be significantly lower than the advertised performance, because the LIED about the their emissions.
At least here in the US, my perception has been just the opposite. VWs not only cost more, but are less reliable than comparable vehicles. They seem to have the street price of a Honda/Toyota, but the reliability of a Nissan/Chevy/Chrysler, and their maintenance costs have a reputation of being about the same as a German luxury car (high). Hence their comparatively small market share here (3-4%).
The one redeeming factor for VW seems to be powertrain options and selling a station wagon that isn't an SUV or a Subaru (Golf Sportwagen).
Volkswagen has excellent interiors. The $18k Golf feels in many ways like a $40k BMW 3-series. Most competitors' interiors are gaudy, cheap and plasticky, ugly, or spartan. Other than BMW, the only people selling the "German sportscar" experience are luxury brands, Volkswagen AG subsidiaries, or both.
Depends on the model, but Golf for the last 5 years has gotten a Very Good (4/5) for reliability from Consumer Reports. They used to be terrible in the mid-2000s, but improved drastically since then.
Whoa. What? If I could use only one adjective to describe VW it would be "plasticky". I've always seen VW interiors as incredibly austere. I drive a 2006 TDI Beetle and I find my 1991 Honda Accord to be more comfortable.
At least in Finland the reputation of VW has dived in the past few years due to major reliability issues. (Automatic) transmission and engine failures are "common". Specifically, I'd stay away from DSG transmissions and TSI engines.
I'm not terribly surprised, considering that the whole scandal is basically meaningless to the consumer experience. I wonder how many people who report on stories like this are aware of how little the average consumer actually cares about deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government regarding changes in emissions characteristics that they will probably never notice.
> I'm not terribly surprised, considering that the whole scandal is basically meaningless to the consumer experience.
Right: the scandal is about VW fudging a test to mislead on the scale of an externality; unlike government tested fuel economy (which is about consumer information, so deception on that hurts primarily the direct purchaser), emissions testing is about protecting the public at large from paying (through environmental impacts) for benefits received by the particular consumer of the vehicle (and, in the form of profits from the trade, the vehicle manufacturer.)
So, on the VW scandal, drivers and the company are the beneficiaries of the deception, so its unsurprising that drivers qua drivers would not be angered by the company's deception.
Until recently(ish) I was unfamiliar with the ___ qua ___ thing, so I thought it would be good to include a definition here, for the benefit of anyone who isn't aware of the term.
"In the capacity of" "as being"
Those might not make the meaning clear by themselves ... Uh.
Ok so in this situation, drivers qua drivers is like, the drivers in being drivers, seperate from what they might be other than drivers.
I think the idea is like, they might care for other reasons, but they don't care about it as part of their being drivers.
I hope that this explanation is not insufficient for anyone who is looking to it to understand the term.
This is a silly distinction. You can't sensibly divorce "drivers" from all the other various functions of human beings who drive.
Many drivers are also people who enjoy living in a clean city with minimal pollution. Many more do not enjoy being lied to by a company they have paid in an explicit contract to exchange money for certified goods. Some of these drivers are also angry that they are being disrespected by their elected officials who are unable or unwilling to represent them in an appropriate manner.
Sure, drivers get a cheaper car in a vacuum. But this vacuum doesn't exist and is merely an academic distinction/rhetorical argument.
You make a good case, but the sales numbers will tell whether you're right.
For my part, I can say I was toying with the idea of buying a Golf, and now VW is firmly off my list. But I'm not really serious about buying a car at this time anyway.
You're agreeing with the post you're calling silly.
"drivers qua drivers don't care" says that while the part of a driver which cares about driving doesn't care, it very strongly implies that there's another part of drivers that does care. Otherwise the OP would have just said "drivers don't care" instead of "drivers qua drivers don't care".
The problem with this view is that emissions are a function of engine management. As with any engineering decision, trade-offs have to be made to hit goals.
Adjusting the code to lower emissions will absolutely impact power output and fuel efficiency. This impacts the consumers directly. And anecdotely, was the reason most people bought TDIs - the amazing combo of power, efficiency and percieved "greeness"
> considering that the whole scandal is basically meaningless to the consumer experience
As soon as an owner takes their vehicle in to get the water pump replaced, or more Urea added to the system, or a host of "dealership only" maintenance tasks that are cropping up in modern cars, their gas mileage will (presumably) take a very large hit. The dealers will have to install the EPA emissions fixes. A manual 2014 VW Passat TDI can hit 50 MPG in a highway driving situation. Fuel efficiency was traded for emissions. The emissions 'patch' will presumably reverse the trade off, and instead of getting higher fuel efficiency, you'll now have lower emissions output. Having a lower fuel economy directly impacts the consumer experience.
>> As another commenter said, I really don't care about "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government".
Well you should care a little, because the result of the "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government" can impact you financially in both a positive and negative fashion.
On the positive -- the financial incentives that VW is offering as a result of the scandal -- IIRC, up to $6K -- make it a great time to upgrade or buy.
On the negative -- public perception of the scandal could lower the resale price of any diesel VW you might own.
I only buy clothes made in sweatshops by 6 year old children because it's cheaper, and as another commenter said, I really don't care about "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government"
That's not a fair comparison. Environmental externalities are not the same as children being exploited for labor, no matter how you frame it.
I do think that it is highly naive to say one doesn't care about the deals and tricks that big corporations pull off. Especially with the rampant consumer economy in the US, being an uninformed consumer is irresponsible. However, I have to agree with the GP, I was just saying yesterday that I also would still be willing to buy a VW. they are really (subjectively by some measures, objective by other) good cars, despite the recent scandal.
I'm vegetarian, not vegan. Some buy only organic, fair-trade food instead of the cheapest, mass-produced variety. Some people are actually informed about the sources of their clothes and choose not to buy some.
There are ethical and moral implications and trade offs for all. I think that judging the OP because VW makes a diesel car that gets only 35MPG instead of 42 and saying it's equivalent to buying clothes from sweat-shop brands is disingenuous at best. As I said above, I do not agree with the lassie-faire sentiment of letting corporations do what they want to buying whatever.
EDIT, for context, the highest level commenter was downvoted below 0 before.
No you're right, they're not equivalent. But I was more attacking the OP's stated justification, and the indefensibly stupid and self-serving attitude that allows a person to make such a statement.
Even if the power and fuel efficiency are decreased, as they almost certainly will have to be, in order to meet the pollution regulations without cheating? It isn't just between VW and the USG -- it's going to take money out of your pocket in the form of higher fuel costs.
I guess you don't care how much pollution you spew -- which doesn't strike me as a commendable attitude -- but the rest of us do, and we're not going to let VW continue to sell cars that pollute well beyond the legal limits in actual use.
"Drivers still like VW" at the moment, before any fixes have been applied.
It's a bit abstract right now. Let's see what happens after the fix is rolled out, the owners need to schedule their appointments for the recalls, deal with (possible) lower fuel economy and performance, and (possible) lower resale values.
lower economy, lower performance, and possible higher maintenance costs too. Some of the proposed fixes involve retro-fitting Urea-based SCR systems, which need to be maintained more than "no filter at all".
But those effects are long-term and therefore less quantified and immediately apparent. Seems to me, the major influencer on how drivers feel about VW is the news items about how bad VW is.
They're not going to retrofit an SCR system on to cars proven to meet emissions standards when the software is running in compliance mode. They're going to reflash the ECU with software that doesn't cheat. The result for the consumer: a minor drop in fuel economy and more frequent cycling of the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) will have a little more noticeable impact on performance than when in cheat mode.
The DPF is like a muffler with a trap to catch the soot and ash from the exhaust. That black stuff you see coming out of a truck but never from a TDI even when in cheat mode. When the DPF is cycling, the engine passes unburned fuel from intake to exhaust on every fourth stroke. The unspent fuel lands on the trap, and when the hot exhaust from the next stroke ignites that fuel, the soot and ash are reduced, which in turn reduces NOx emissions. If they are smart with the software, they'll try to run the DPF when the car is cruising not accelerating, and the impact on performance will be hardly noticeable at all.
Cycling the DPF more often will likely result in a longer lifespan for that unit. Currently they need to be cleaned when they become fouled. Cycling the DPF more frequently, thus burning the soot out of the trap more regularly will likely reduce fouling.
> deal with (possible) lower fuel economy and performance,
Not clear if these results will hold up, but CR ran some tests that seemed to indicate that running the car in "cheat mode" had a relatively small impact on performance - "both cars added less than a second in the 0 to 60 mph time. The Jetta saw fuel economy drop from 53 to 50 mpg, and the Sportwagen went from 50 to 46 mpg." http://www.wired.com/2015/10/vw-diesel-cheat-mode-mpg-perfor...
They will be pissed off. Not at VW, but at "stupid government" that piles "unnecessary" regulations that make them part with more and more of their hard-earned money.
I'm pretty sure VW won't get hurt even a little by all of this. "Voting with wallet" doesn't work. If you don't make a corporation pay up front to the public (i.e. to the government), nothing will change.
What is amazing is the fact people don't realize is that what VW did indirectly caused disability and even death, but hey if it does not affect me I'll just buy a VW anyway.
I'm really sick of these TBTF corporations doing whatever they want. They do something illegal that causes a lot of harm and if they are caught they just cruise the waters of ignorance to safety and then rinse and repeat.
By polluting... The various emissions from a diesel engine (the gases other than CO2) are all toxic, and cumulatively affect the health of those who breathe those emissions (ie. people in cities).
More directly, VW's excess polluting caused people to die. How many is hard to say for sure but almost certainly more than any of the recent safety related automotive engineering design screwups lately such as Toyota's "unintended acceleration" problem and GM's bad switches.
Every single car driver out there causes immense harm to the society, it's not only the car manufacturers at fault.
If you can imagine a city where people ride bikes instead of cars, with no noise, pollution ,traffic jams, accidents and so on. You'll quickly realise that all car drivers are murderers. A quick reminder of Tetraethyllead should make you realise how many things most people are missing.
Can you expand on why a city where people rode bikes would be rid of traffic jams and accidents?
My guess is traffic will be just as bad in downtown areas with frequent lights and pedestrian crossings.
While bikes would certainly result in less fatal accidents, I think the frequency of accidents would be higher since bikes can ride so close to each other and pedestrians.
> What is amazing is the fact people don't realize is that * insert any global industry * caused disability and even death, but hey if it does not affect me I'll just buy * the product * anyway.
This is true for almost anything. Food industry is a huge greenhouse gases producer which indirectly causes pollution and some deaths. Meat, which might be considered a luxury, is the top ingridient in many dishes, environmental impact is higher for producing meat that that of driving cars (globally). Just heating causes pollution and death.
Our reliance on fossil fuels will in 100 years cause a lot of indirect deaths.
> environmental impact is higher for producing meat that that of driving cars (globally)
That's a pretty tall claim. Have you got a citation? I'd also argue that there are ways to grow meat much more environmentally friendly and not all that more expensive than traditional feed lots.
> People aren't sheep. They just don't care. Sheep care, at least for their babies and each other.
You're a fool if you believe this. Sheep don't plan their environment in any kind of meaningful way, they just wander around eating. If you cut the field in half and move the sheep from side to side and actually manage their grazing you can get more production per acre than if you just leave the sheep to themselves.
Without the farmer intervening and selling sheep off, they'd quickly outgrow the feeding capacity of their naive grazing strategy, continue having babies, and start causing deaths from malnutrition.
Please learn about natural systems a little bit before spouting things that sound insightful but which are actually devoid of any reality.
> That's a pretty tall claim. Have you got a citation? I'd also argue that there are ways to grow meat much more environmentally friendly and not all that more expensive than traditional feed lots.
There are newer reports but I just want to point out how long the information is out.
This is the direct citation:
> The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is higher share than transport.
What's also a little bit comforting is that the impact is reducing (production is getting more and more efficient).
Although as Chinese became rich and started eating meat insanely fast doubling the consumption of the USA, same might happen to peoples of India and Africa.
Increase of demand might neutralize the efficiency increase.
> You're a fool if you believe this. ...
Well, this is not really sheep I had in mind. I was thinking more of the free roaming - no owner - kind of animals.
> Please learn about natural systems a little bit before spouting things that sound insightful but which are actually devoid of any reality.
I completely do not get how my half-assed comment about sheep escalated to your comments about my education (or lack of).
If you grow grass-fed meat instead of grain fed you eliminate most all of the net CO2 emissions. There are still gross CO2 emissions, but once you stop drivings tractors and making fertilizer, there's very little net impact of animals save perhaps the sequestering effects. Net CO2 emissions are from "extra" carbon going into the atmosphere, gross CO2 emissions are from CO2 emissions of recently sequestered carbon.
So burning wood from clearing brush in your backyard would be gross CO2 emissions, but burning gas in the chainsaw would be net emissions (at least until people start synthesizing fuel from CO2 and water).
> Well, this is not really sheep I had in mind. I was thinking more of the free roaming - no owner - kind of animals.
Those animals too will not plan their reproductive urges around the environment so they will also tend to overpopulate and underpopulate in cycles. I don't really consider that caring, that's just nature taking its course.
> I completely do not get how my half-assed comment about sheep escalated to your comments about my education (or lack of).
If you want to be sarcastic, make it obvious. You made a lot of matter-of-fact statements prior, so why shouldn't I take it at face value? Show empirically that sheep do care, or say that you meant it sarcastically. Internet comments don't make it obvious that you're smirking.
I'd like to see grass-fed meat meeting the demands of 5 billion people.
No one is arguing that the environmental impact can't be reduced. I'm just saying that people are blind and don't care about deaths caused by having a car, but they are also blind and don't care about deaths caused by eating meat.
Yes, not everyone buys their meat from bad sources, I'd definitely like for it to become a majority.
Unfortunately, there's not enough land for that, I'd rather eat bugs.
> If you want to be sarcastic, make it obvious.
Yes I agree that my comment about sheep was entirely unnecessary, as was this whole discussion, I removed it.
Basically he argues that yes you can. There are a few reasons this makes sense.
1. All food comes from the sun to begin with (except for what diesel you add in via plowing, etc)
2. There aren't huge variations in different plant's ability to perform photosynthesis (might be 2x, might be 5x, but probably not 1000x)
3. This means it doesn't matter too much if you grow the grain, harvest it, transport it, feed it to cows or if you just grow grass and let them eat it
4. Grasses grow according to a S-curve meaning that there's an optimal height to grow a grass up to, and harvest it down to, for maximal production which is entirely different than annual crops
I'd really encourage you to watch the video, though, if you can stand it because it's very enlightening.
> 1. All food comes from the sun to begin with (except for what diesel you add in via plowing, etc)
Nitpick, but all energy we use comes from the Sun (ok, ultra-nitpick, some come from the previous star, but we're talking nuclear reactions in Earth's core here) - all fossil fuels, as well as wind and hydro are nothing but accumulated and transformed solar power.
We are not talking about other corporations here so please don't generalize. I hate it when this happens. We are talking about VW not the meat industry or Chevron who by the way distroyed almost single handed a large portion of the amazon.
VW did something wrong, people got hurt, they were exposed and there is sufficient evidence.
Just because someone else is doing it does not mean that they should get away with it.
And by sheep I mean that we are just ignorant about the bigger picture here.
If VW will emerge out of this relatively unscathed it will create a dangerous precedent and the and the auto industry will have learned nothing.
Personally I try to do the right thing, like trying not buying gas provided by BP or Chevron if possible and I can tell you rigth now that my next car will not be a VW.
Why is generalization something you hate? Your objections stand but just because VW is caught at doing something wrong it doesn't make it any different.
Owning a car kills people indirectly, be it VW or not. Yes they deceived with a purpose but people accept the direct and indirect deception, be it in eating meat, or driving botched/normal cars. This is always the way it is.
One can have so many conflicting opinions and attitudes inside one's head, one can be mad about VW but not mad about the highly subsidised food industry, or transportation industry in large.
It's just the way it is. Yes, as you've said, almost everyone is ignorant about the bigger picture.
I was just trying to say that by looking at everything else I'm not at all surprised/shocked/disappointed with people's behavior. It's the way people are, and it always was as it is today, it might sound fairly pessimistic, but an average person needs a car to travel around quicker, needs meat to nurture their palate, needs heating to avoid the inconvenience of dressing several layers of clothes in their home. Given all of these entirely personal, individual, selfish needs it is no surprising at all that the majority doesn't care / see the bigger picture.
Ok I get it now... You are saying that this is a normal reaction given the current circumstances.
But still... a human life can't be measured in money and yet they routinely calculate and assign a value to it like it is livestock. All this misery just for making more profit. It's disgusting and it fills me with rage.
Ok we need to eat and we need transportation but we can also choose what to eat and what vehicle to drive. If are made aware of a vehicle (in this case) that causes harm to others and we do nothing then we are no different from the company that produced that vehicles with full knowledge of what they where doing and we have no right to complain.
I am not fooling myself, i know this is our 'reality' but people act sometimes with great selflessness. I refuse to think that we can't rise above our selfish needs.
Blue bell knowingly sold tainted ice cream that killed people. People went absolutely nuts when it came back to grocery stores. I ruled them out for life. The general public just doesn't seem to care about anything unless it directly appeals to them. Not in my back yard syndrome on a global scale.
I never heard of that, but it reminds me that when I moved to Minnesota in the late 90's the phrase "salmonella vanilla" was associated with Schwann's Ice Cream. Try finding anyone these days who even thinks of that. I see Schwann's making home delivery of their frozen grocery products all over the place (mmm, cheesy tater tots!). They seem to be even more popular now.
I own a 2011 Jetta Sportwagen TDI (my 3rd tdi, and 4th --and last -- vw/audi), and I am royally pissed. I will not buy another VW nor Audi. I loved my tdi for its combination of performance, comfort and carbon footprint (42 mpg). I try to "vote with my dollars", and am strongly pro-environment. Outrage is appropriate here, imho. I encourage everyone to boycott VW/Audi. Let's send a signal.
I suspect that what will very likely be the case is that VW will have to drastically drop prices to maintain sales. The result will be that they become more popular as an inexpensive car and sales will shoot back up, but with less total revenue for VW.
Some will be outraged, but a bunch of other people will be happy. It will be interesting to see which group is larger!
I have an unambiguously dirty '03 TDI (though the B99 in the tank makes it less bad than it might otherwise be, and I bike to work while it sits in the driveway), but I certainly only intend to buy electric/hybrid vehicles going forward. But VW is heading that direction, too: http://qz.com/522844/volkswagen-is-pegging-its-fate-to-a-maj...
The TDI, even when in cheat mode, continues to be among the lowest carbon footprint of any vehicle. The cheat mode causes NOx emissions to climb up to that of a diesel truck, think a 16' box truck. And the car is capable of complying with NOx emissions.
Some rogue engineers made a hack to have the MPGs come out as 31/40 instead of 29/38. That's what happened. VW will take corrective actions across the board, right down to fixing your vehicle to comply with emissions regulations.
Even if they cheated during the tests, they were exactly the same cars before and after the reveal of that fact, so I don't see why people would suddenly stop liking their cars.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the cars will be "fixed" via a recall of some sort, which will likely reprogram the ECU to reduce emissions, which will in turn reduce performance and gas mileage. Now that might be voluntary - I don't know if laws will compel people to do that, though emission testing might start requiring such updates. Plus, the new cars released will not be able to "have great gas mileage, performance AND low emissions" without technology advances since the cheating is caught and disallowed going forward. So they might be less competitive, initially (though in the US, there isn't really much diesel competition.)
Since these cars exceed emission tresholds, they shouldn't be on streets. It's likely that owners will be forced to hand in their cars for a firmware upgrade after which they will be much slower and/or with worse mpg.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadLinkbait, anyone?
Most of the responses to the finding have been snarky comments about "how vw is bad." (We need to find out what went wrong and fix it... circlejerking about the whole issue, or the negative press, isn't going to do a lot of good)
Um... That is exactly what they did. They falsified their emission test results. The car you are driving is NOT the same as the one that passed the tests.
The fact that it was possible to deceive the tests does not change the fact that they were blatantly and illegally falsifying them. The performance of the vehicles when they pass the proper regulations is likely to be significantly lower than the advertised performance, because the LIED about the their emissions.
The one redeeming factor for VW seems to be powertrain options and selling a station wagon that isn't an SUV or a Subaru (Golf Sportwagen).
Depends on the model, but Golf for the last 5 years has gotten a Very Good (4/5) for reliability from Consumer Reports. They used to be terrible in the mid-2000s, but improved drastically since then.
Right: the scandal is about VW fudging a test to mislead on the scale of an externality; unlike government tested fuel economy (which is about consumer information, so deception on that hurts primarily the direct purchaser), emissions testing is about protecting the public at large from paying (through environmental impacts) for benefits received by the particular consumer of the vehicle (and, in the form of profits from the trade, the vehicle manufacturer.)
So, on the VW scandal, drivers and the company are the beneficiaries of the deception, so its unsurprising that drivers qua drivers would not be angered by the company's deception.
"In the capacity of" "as being"
Those might not make the meaning clear by themselves ... Uh.
Ok so in this situation, drivers qua drivers is like, the drivers in being drivers, seperate from what they might be other than drivers.
I think the idea is like, they might care for other reasons, but they don't care about it as part of their being drivers.
I hope that this explanation is not insufficient for anyone who is looking to it to understand the term.
This is a silly distinction. You can't sensibly divorce "drivers" from all the other various functions of human beings who drive.
Many drivers are also people who enjoy living in a clean city with minimal pollution. Many more do not enjoy being lied to by a company they have paid in an explicit contract to exchange money for certified goods. Some of these drivers are also angry that they are being disrespected by their elected officials who are unable or unwilling to represent them in an appropriate manner.
Sure, drivers get a cheaper car in a vacuum. But this vacuum doesn't exist and is merely an academic distinction/rhetorical argument.
For my part, I can say I was toying with the idea of buying a Golf, and now VW is firmly off my list. But I'm not really serious about buying a car at this time anyway.
"drivers qua drivers don't care" says that while the part of a driver which cares about driving doesn't care, it very strongly implies that there's another part of drivers that does care. Otherwise the OP would have just said "drivers don't care" instead of "drivers qua drivers don't care".
Adjusting the code to lower emissions will absolutely impact power output and fuel efficiency. This impacts the consumers directly. And anecdotely, was the reason most people bought TDIs - the amazing combo of power, efficiency and percieved "greeness"
As soon as an owner takes their vehicle in to get the water pump replaced, or more Urea added to the system, or a host of "dealership only" maintenance tasks that are cropping up in modern cars, their gas mileage will (presumably) take a very large hit. The dealers will have to install the EPA emissions fixes. A manual 2014 VW Passat TDI can hit 50 MPG in a highway driving situation. Fuel efficiency was traded for emissions. The emissions 'patch' will presumably reverse the trade off, and instead of getting higher fuel efficiency, you'll now have lower emissions output. Having a lower fuel economy directly impacts the consumer experience.
As another commenter said, I really don't care about "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government".
Well you should care a little, because the result of the "the deals and tricks between giant corporations and the Government" can impact you financially in both a positive and negative fashion.
On the positive -- the financial incentives that VW is offering as a result of the scandal -- IIRC, up to $6K -- make it a great time to upgrade or buy.
On the negative -- public perception of the scandal could lower the resale price of any diesel VW you might own.
I do think that it is highly naive to say one doesn't care about the deals and tricks that big corporations pull off. Especially with the rampant consumer economy in the US, being an uninformed consumer is irresponsible. However, I have to agree with the GP, I was just saying yesterday that I also would still be willing to buy a VW. they are really (subjectively by some measures, objective by other) good cars, despite the recent scandal.
Beyond a sufficient level of terrible, relative comparison is unnecessary.
There are ethical and moral implications and trade offs for all. I think that judging the OP because VW makes a diesel car that gets only 35MPG instead of 42 and saying it's equivalent to buying clothes from sweat-shop brands is disingenuous at best. As I said above, I do not agree with the lassie-faire sentiment of letting corporations do what they want to buying whatever.
EDIT, for context, the highest level commenter was downvoted below 0 before.
I guess you don't care how much pollution you spew -- which doesn't strike me as a commendable attitude -- but the rest of us do, and we're not going to let VW continue to sell cars that pollute well beyond the legal limits in actual use.
It's a bit abstract right now. Let's see what happens after the fix is rolled out, the owners need to schedule their appointments for the recalls, deal with (possible) lower fuel economy and performance, and (possible) lower resale values.
But those effects are long-term and therefore less quantified and immediately apparent. Seems to me, the major influencer on how drivers feel about VW is the news items about how bad VW is.
The DPF is like a muffler with a trap to catch the soot and ash from the exhaust. That black stuff you see coming out of a truck but never from a TDI even when in cheat mode. When the DPF is cycling, the engine passes unburned fuel from intake to exhaust on every fourth stroke. The unspent fuel lands on the trap, and when the hot exhaust from the next stroke ignites that fuel, the soot and ash are reduced, which in turn reduces NOx emissions. If they are smart with the software, they'll try to run the DPF when the car is cruising not accelerating, and the impact on performance will be hardly noticeable at all.
Cycling the DPF more often will likely result in a longer lifespan for that unit. Currently they need to be cleaned when they become fouled. Cycling the DPF more frequently, thus burning the soot out of the trap more regularly will likely reduce fouling.
Not clear if these results will hold up, but CR ran some tests that seemed to indicate that running the car in "cheat mode" had a relatively small impact on performance - "both cars added less than a second in the 0 to 60 mph time. The Jetta saw fuel economy drop from 53 to 50 mpg, and the Sportwagen went from 50 to 46 mpg." http://www.wired.com/2015/10/vw-diesel-cheat-mode-mpg-perfor...
I'm pretty sure VW won't get hurt even a little by all of this. "Voting with wallet" doesn't work. If you don't make a corporation pay up front to the public (i.e. to the government), nothing will change.
I'm really sick of these TBTF corporations doing whatever they want. They do something illegal that causes a lot of harm and if they are caught they just cruise the waters of ignorance to safety and then rinse and repeat.
We are just sheep...
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/isee/p-3-30-13/
If you can imagine a city where people ride bikes instead of cars, with no noise, pollution ,traffic jams, accidents and so on. You'll quickly realise that all car drivers are murderers. A quick reminder of Tetraethyllead should make you realise how many things most people are missing.
My guess is traffic will be just as bad in downtown areas with frequent lights and pedestrian crossings.
While bikes would certainly result in less fatal accidents, I think the frequency of accidents would be higher since bikes can ride so close to each other and pedestrians.
Next time you're in a traffic jam, look at all the cars around you, likely most of them have only one person in it.
Now try to visualize how much space each of those people would take up on a bike instead of a car. All of a sudden you're surrounded by empty space.
Sure its possible to have traffic jams with bikes, but that threshold is so much higher.
Please don't post over-the-top flamebait to HN.
This is true for almost anything. Food industry is a huge greenhouse gases producer which indirectly causes pollution and some deaths. Meat, which might be considered a luxury, is the top ingridient in many dishes, environmental impact is higher for producing meat that that of driving cars (globally). Just heating causes pollution and death.
Our reliance on fossil fuels will in 100 years cause a lot of indirect deaths.
People aren't sheep. They just don't care.
That's a pretty tall claim. Have you got a citation? I'd also argue that there are ways to grow meat much more environmentally friendly and not all that more expensive than traditional feed lots.
> People aren't sheep. They just don't care. Sheep care, at least for their babies and each other.
You're a fool if you believe this. Sheep don't plan their environment in any kind of meaningful way, they just wander around eating. If you cut the field in half and move the sheep from side to side and actually manage their grazing you can get more production per acre than if you just leave the sheep to themselves.
Without the farmer intervening and selling sheep off, they'd quickly outgrow the feeding capacity of their naive grazing strategy, continue having babies, and start causing deaths from malnutrition.
Please learn about natural systems a little bit before spouting things that sound insightful but which are actually devoid of any reality.
FAO of the United Nations - report 2006 http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM
There are newer reports but I just want to point out how long the information is out.
This is the direct citation:
> The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is higher share than transport.
What's also a little bit comforting is that the impact is reducing (production is getting more and more efficient). Although as Chinese became rich and started eating meat insanely fast doubling the consumption of the USA, same might happen to peoples of India and Africa.
Increase of demand might neutralize the efficiency increase.
> You're a fool if you believe this. ...
Well, this is not really sheep I had in mind. I was thinking more of the free roaming - no owner - kind of animals.
> Please learn about natural systems a little bit before spouting things that sound insightful but which are actually devoid of any reality.
I completely do not get how my half-assed comment about sheep escalated to your comments about my education (or lack of).
So burning wood from clearing brush in your backyard would be gross CO2 emissions, but burning gas in the chainsaw would be net emissions (at least until people start synthesizing fuel from CO2 and water).
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/in-defense-of-the-cow-h...
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ss574
http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/catalog/39886
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep10892
https://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/emissions-redu...
> Well, this is not really sheep I had in mind. I was thinking more of the free roaming - no owner - kind of animals.
Those animals too will not plan their reproductive urges around the environment so they will also tend to overpopulate and underpopulate in cycles. I don't really consider that caring, that's just nature taking its course.
> I completely do not get how my half-assed comment about sheep escalated to your comments about my education (or lack of).
If you want to be sarcastic, make it obvious. You made a lot of matter-of-fact statements prior, so why shouldn't I take it at face value? Show empirically that sheep do care, or say that you meant it sarcastically. Internet comments don't make it obvious that you're smirking.
No one is arguing that the environmental impact can't be reduced. I'm just saying that people are blind and don't care about deaths caused by having a car, but they are also blind and don't care about deaths caused by eating meat.
Yes, not everyone buys their meat from bad sources, I'd definitely like for it to become a majority.
Unfortunately, there's not enough land for that, I'd rather eat bugs.
> If you want to be sarcastic, make it obvious.
Yes I agree that my comment about sheep was entirely unnecessary, as was this whole discussion, I removed it.
Basically he argues that yes you can. There are a few reasons this makes sense.
1. All food comes from the sun to begin with (except for what diesel you add in via plowing, etc)
2. There aren't huge variations in different plant's ability to perform photosynthesis (might be 2x, might be 5x, but probably not 1000x)
3. This means it doesn't matter too much if you grow the grain, harvest it, transport it, feed it to cows or if you just grow grass and let them eat it
4. Grasses grow according to a S-curve meaning that there's an optimal height to grow a grass up to, and harvest it down to, for maximal production which is entirely different than annual crops
I'd really encourage you to watch the video, though, if you can stand it because it's very enlightening.
Nitpick, but all energy we use comes from the Sun (ok, ultra-nitpick, some come from the previous star, but we're talking nuclear reactions in Earth's core here) - all fossil fuels, as well as wind and hydro are nothing but accumulated and transformed solar power.
If VW will emerge out of this relatively unscathed it will create a dangerous precedent and the and the auto industry will have learned nothing. Personally I try to do the right thing, like trying not buying gas provided by BP or Chevron if possible and I can tell you rigth now that my next car will not be a VW.
Owning a car kills people indirectly, be it VW or not. Yes they deceived with a purpose but people accept the direct and indirect deception, be it in eating meat, or driving botched/normal cars. This is always the way it is.
One can have so many conflicting opinions and attitudes inside one's head, one can be mad about VW but not mad about the highly subsidised food industry, or transportation industry in large.
It's just the way it is. Yes, as you've said, almost everyone is ignorant about the bigger picture.
I was just trying to say that by looking at everything else I'm not at all surprised/shocked/disappointed with people's behavior. It's the way people are, and it always was as it is today, it might sound fairly pessimistic, but an average person needs a car to travel around quicker, needs meat to nurture their palate, needs heating to avoid the inconvenience of dressing several layers of clothes in their home. Given all of these entirely personal, individual, selfish needs it is no surprising at all that the majority doesn't care / see the bigger picture.
I am not fooling myself, i know this is our 'reality' but people act sometimes with great selflessness. I refuse to think that we can't rise above our selfish needs.
People have short memories for this stuff.
Some will be outraged, but a bunch of other people will be happy. It will be interesting to see which group is larger!
Some rogue engineers made a hack to have the MPGs come out as 31/40 instead of 29/38. That's what happened. VW will take corrective actions across the board, right down to fixing your vehicle to comply with emissions regulations.